Glen Sample Ely is a Texas historian and documentary producer. Ely earned his Ph.D. from Texas Christian University and is the author of Where the West Begins: Debating Texas Identity.
The Texas Frontier and the Butterfield Overland Mail, 1858 - 1861
may well be the most fascinating and intelligently written book I
have read in decades. Glen Sample Ely offers us an exhaustively
researched, compelling story, sumptuously illustrated throughout.
This is frontier history at its best."" - Jerry D. Thompson,
Regents Professor of History, Texas A&M International
University, Laredo
""More than a history of the short-lived operations of the
Butterfield Overland Mail in Texas, this is, as Glen Sample Ely
explains, 'an American tale' of the dreams, achievements, failures,
and violence of the nineteenth-century American West. The
impressive product of a twenty-five year labor of love, it is built
upon the author's personal observations and field research as well
as his extraordinary command of private, local, state, and federal
records."" - Robert Wooster, author of The American Military
Frontiers: The United States Army in the West, 1783 - 1900
""No other book in the modern era matches the scope of Glen Sample
Ely's. His volume will supplant that of Roscoe and Margaret
Conkling's 1947 work on the Butterfield Overland Mail and become
the starting point for many other studies."" - Richard B. McCaslin,
author of Tainted Breeze: The Great Hanging at Gainesville, Texas,
1862 and Fighting Stock: John S. ""Rip"" Ford of Texas
""Glen Sample Ely has written an extraordinarily readable,
realistic, and accurate history of the Butterfield Overland Mail
route through Texas. His superb narration is enhanced by maps and
photographs and bolstered by his exhaustive research in government,
state, and museum archives, as well as by interviews with
descendants of those who lived and died on the Texas Overland
Trail."" - Howard R. Lamar, Sterling Professor of History Emeritus,
Yale University
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